UBC honours Japanese-Canadian students six decades after Second World War internment

Kent Spencer, Postmedia News03.17.2012

The University of B.C. plans to honour its former Japanese-Canadian students who were pulled out of their classrooms and sent to internment camps in 1942 by granting them honorary degrees. It also plans to publicly grant degrees to those students who had already graduated but missed their graduation ceremony because of the internments. This will all happen at UBC's annual congregation in May. Fred Sasaki was one of the students removed from the university. This is the Sasaki family circa 1937: front 3, sister Kaneko, sister Ryoko, sister Nobuko, back row, sister Tetsuko, sister Keiko, Fred, mother Midori, father Shuichi, sister Sumiko.Submitted
/ Sasaki family

Nori Nishio and his son Don with a halibut caught during a fishing trip off Winter Harbour (northern Vancouver Island) in 2007. The University of B.C. plans to honour its former Japanese-Canadian students who were pulled out of their classrooms and sent to internment camps in 1942 by granting them honorary degrees. It also plans to publicly grant degrees to those students who had already graduated but missed their graduation ceremony because of the internments. This will all happen at UBC's annual congregation in May. Nishio is one of the former students who will get an honorary degree.Submitted
/ Nishio family

Nori Nishio sitting in a boat off Winter Harbour (northern Vancouver Island) on a fishing trip in 2007. The University of B.C. plans to honour its former Japanese-Canadian students who were pulled out of their classrooms and sent to internment camps in 1942 by granting them honorary degrees. It also plans to publicly grant degrees to those students who had already graduated but missed their graduation ceremony because of the internments. This will all happen at UBC's annual congregation in May. Nishio is one of the former students who will get an honorary degree.Submitted
/ Nishio family

The University of B.C. plans to honour its former Japanese-Canadian students who were pulled out of their classrooms and sent to internment camps in 1942 by granting them honorary degrees. It also plans to publicly grant degrees to those students who had already graduated but missed their graduation ceremony because of the internments. This will all happen at UBC's annual congregation in May. Fred Sasaki was one of the students removed from the university. This is Fred with his parents and sister, Kay, circa 1921.Submitted
/ Sasaki family

On Dec. 7, 1941, University of B.C. commerce student Fred Sasaki, 23, got a hard lesson in how quickly life can be turned upside down.

He was living with his Japanese parents and six Canadian-born sisters when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the Second World War spread to the Pacific.

That very night, there was a knock on the door at the family’s two-bedroom rental home in East Vancouver.

“Two tall men from the RCMP took my dad away. They were dressed in plain clothes. It was awful. It changed our lives forever,” says Sasaki, 93, now a retired business executive living in Scarborough, Ont.

One of 74 former students, he will be granted honourary degrees at the university’s annual congregation on May 30. UBC, which has acknowledged its role in the injustice, wants to make amends by formally welcoming them into the alumni.

Sasaki says the school’s efforts to redress past misdeeds are just fine with him.

“It’s very good of them,” he says.

Some 21 students are still alive, says Mary Kitagawa, a Delta, B.C. woman who came up with the idea to honour them in 2008 and approached the university.

A great deal of work remained to be done. Officials had to decide how the process would move forward through the administration and what form the degrees would take. Kitagawa and her husband were given an old student list and spent long hours on a painstaking search to track people down all over the country. Fortunately, as word spread of their endeavour, help was received from others.

“I am so happy for the students,” says Kitagawa, 77, whose own father was picked up by the RCMP when she was just seven years old.

She says 21,000 Japanese-Canadians underwent a form of ethnic cleansing in B.C. when they were forcibly removed from the coast.

Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King gave the order because there were fears that locals would aid the Japanese military.

“The students suffered grievous losses,” says Kitagawa. “Many mothers and fathers went to their graves regretting they were not able to finish their studies. By granting the degrees, a bond is being created with the university.”

“It was a nice, ethnic community. Our best friends were Italians who lived next door. There were very few Japanese. Unfortunately, some teachers were prejudiced against us . . . I was able to pour out my feelings to our landlord, a sea captain who was very sympathetic,” she says.

“When they took my dad away, our landlord and neighbours cried for us. Fortunately, my mother was a quiet, stoic woman who never fell apart despite being left on her own with the whole family,” she says.

“There was a sense of aloneness and sadness because all of a sudden we were enemy aliens, which we children never felt. We grew up with Caucasians and always felt we were no different, except for our looks,” she says.

Fred, a handsome, athletic-looking young man, ended up in Toronto looking for work and a place to stay. Many doors were closed because he was a “Jap.”

“He was turned down a lot,” she says.

Several years later the whole family reunited in Ontario when her father was released from a prisoner of war camp and the women left an internment camp at Kaslo in B.C.

Sasaki says his father, a hard-working man who had a thriving log export business, lost everything at the age of 46.

Internees’ possessions were sold off, never to be returned.

“He was not bitter about it. He always used a Japanese expression, Shikata ga nai, to explain what had happened. It means: ‘It can’t be helped,’” says Sasaki.

Former UBC student Dr. Nori Nishio, a retired Nanaimo dentist, says many of the students were good, Canadian-born citizens.

“I had 24 hours to leave or I would have been arrested,” says Nishio. “The politicians called it the Yellow Peril, but there was never a recorded case of disloyalty.

“You were just a teenager. You had to leave friends and your neighbourhood. It was very sad for those who weren’t able to complete their education. It’s mainly them that I think about,” he says.

Racist politics

Vancouver politicians such as city alderman Halford Wilson and MP Howard Green pressed hard to remove the Japanese from B.C. in the 1930s and 1940s.

Their views made big black headlines in the newspapers, says Sasaki, and prejudice also hit on personal levels.

Sasaki was not allowed to serve Caucasian customers at his banking job, and another job interview ended when they found out he was a “Jap.”

“That was the most humiliating experience of my life,” he says.

Fortunately, acts of kindness shone through in 1942-43, when Sasaki was most desperate for help.

His UBC professor, Ellis Morrow, arranged for him to complete his degree by correspondence in Calgary.

Another UBC professor, Henry Angers, spoke out against the government’s actions.

“The professors’ support made us feel good. There were people who understood,” says Sasaki.

He was down to his last pennies in Toronto when a baker gave him a job lugging 50-kilogram sacks of flour. And a Polish couple was persuaded to rent him a room for $3 a week.

He says those are the types of things that enabled him to survive and eventually help reunite his family.

Japanese internees such as Sasaki received $19,000 and an apology from the Canadian government in 1988.

‘What-might-have-beens’

UBC history professor Henry Yu says a heavy price was paid by those not able to earn their degrees.

“It symbolized all the other costs and what-might-have-beens. There’s no doubt in my mind a vibrant community was destroyed. The pain was so raw that many moms and dads never told their children about it.

“The ceremony on May 30 at UBC will be a powerful, emotional moment. It’s a chance to give the students something that they lost. It’s also a measure of how far Canada has come,” he says.

UBC is hosting a related public symposium from 5-8 p.m. on Wednesday at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. Lessons from the past will be studied and future problems anticipated.

“Racism in Vancouver’s past is a surprise to the younger generation, because we have been a multicultural nation since 1968,” says Yu.

Moving in exalted circles

Many internees put the pain behind them and went on to build successful lives.

Nishio, now 88, built a successful dental practice in Nanaimo. He was one of the few who returned to B.C.

By the 1960s, he travelled in exalted circles as a host on fishing trips to the likes of Prince Philip and Prime Minister John Diefenbaker.

Sasaki also prospered, rising to become vice-president of finance at Canadian Tire.

He says all the racial fuss seems pretty ironic now, because three generations later “90 per cent of our children” have intermarried with non-Japanese people.

He is pleased with his life in general and grateful at the way things turned out in Toronto during his especially trying times in 1943.

“I was very fortunate,” he says.

Vancouver Province

kspencer@theprovince.com

Twitter.com/kentspencer2

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UBC honours Japanese-Canadian students six decades after Second World War internment